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Category: Pick of the Week
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“The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain”
At the Wende Museum, “The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain” spotlights 33 artists that lived in Eastern Bloc countries during Soviet rule. This provocatively themed survey includes familiar names such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Geta Brătescu and Natalia LL, but is most compelling for featuring work by numerous avant-garde artists rarely shown in the U.S. In contrast to the conformism often associated with Eastern European art of the time, a spirit of defiance and experimentation pervades their works in diverse media ranging from painting to performance documentation. Before perusing the show, be sure to pick up a laminated catalog near the entrance, as didactic labels are scant and you’ll undoubtedly encounter artists that pique your curiosity. An unforgettable photograph from Gundula Schulze Eldowy‘s “Tamerlan” series (1979-1987) overturns beauty stereotypes by presenting an aged amputee in an Olympia-esque pose. Equally captivating is Gabriele Stötzer‘s “Conversations” (1984), a series of sequential montages poignantly capturing an acquaintance’s mother on her deathbed. Czech artist Běla Kolářová‘s drawing, Day after day goes and everyone else 1 (1979), reads as feminine take on the modernist grid format; her unconventional media of makeup on cardboard seem to betoken scarcity of materials. One of the most engaging sections presents outré fashions from Allerleirauh (example above, photo by Sibylle Bergemann) and Erfurt Women’s Group, who challenged East Germany’s sartorial status quo with their punk streetwear. Affixed to a luminous window beyond, Karla Woisnitza‘s allegorical Drawings on the Myth of Medea (1985) is a contemporary feminist reflection on the legend of vengeful Medea.
Wende Museum
10808 Culver Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90230
Show runs through Apr. 5 -
Francis DiFronzo
Irvine-based painter Francis DiFronzo has a knack for capturing the eerie desolation of the Mojave Desert. The title of his show, “Proof of Life,” speaks to the fact that his paintings are devoid of people, yet replete with signs of civilization and the desert’s own seemingly animate presence. Apparently depicting a sight off Dillon Road, a lonely byway connecting Indio and Palm Springs, First Light Dillon Road (all works 2019) evokes the splendor of a craggy mountainside bathed in salmon-gold sunrise, its shadowed crevices glowing amethyst. Other scenes, most of which take place at twilight or after nightfall, are more mysterious. Bringing to mind the apprehensive tenor of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, lone boxcars and neon signposts for defunct motels and diners are inexplicably illuminated; vintage automobiles lurk in deserted parking lots with lights on but no one there. From ancient petroglyphs to recently abandoned structures, deserts are full of detached ghosts of humanity. In The Cathedral, tiny legible graffiti rendered in detail on the side of a rail car evoke disembodied voices speaking from an indefinite past, betokening the passage of time and the transience of hordes who move through stretches of the desert, lingering only a while yet leaving marks of their existence for years to come.
George Billis Gallery
2716 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Feb. 15 -
Kristy Luck
Floral, terrene, celestial and human elements coalesce to form otherworldly realms in Kristy Luck’s paintings suffused with mysterious symbolism. Evoking subconscious vistas, the Los Angeles artist’s scenes are reminiscent of abstract landscapes by Modernist painters such as Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Florence Miller Pierce and Agnes Pelton. The latter two were members of the Transcendental Painting Group, a 1938-1942 movement in New Mexico whose aim was “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative worlds that are idealistic and spiritual.” Luck’s ethos appears similar; but instead of idealism, her paintings’ tenor is one of brooding introspection. In Overthinker (2019, pictured above), a headless body lies aglow as though on a pyre above a patterned valley intermeshed with a protuberance resembling a snake-necked turtle with a human face. Other paintings evoke teeth erupting as cinder cones, tornadoes storming across meditative meadows, pitchers filling giant hands, and wavy lines meandering like riverbeds in the sky. Each of these compositions seems imbued with idiosyncratic significance that remains tantalizingly open to viewers’ speculation.
Philip Martin Gallery
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Feb. 22 -
Käthe Kollwitz; Jean-François Millet
At the Getty, two exhibitions of works on paper examine process and technique while presenting disparate views of peasantry. The Getty Research Institute’s “Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics” comprises over 50 prints, preparatory drawings and studies by controversial German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), whose life spanned three turbulent eras of Germanic history. Whereas discussions of Kollwitz often emphasize her personal history and politics, this show highlights her technical versatility across varied graphic media, offering insight into the evolution of her visual language. Sequences of proofs and finished pieces from several print cycles, including “The Weavers” and “The Peasants’ War,” track her process of revising compositions and switching mediums to achieve her desired ends. For instance, studies for The Ploughmen (ca. 1906-1907, example above) illustrate how she eliminated multiple figures from various compositions before finally settling on a duo of oxen-like men whose backbreaking pose she further honed. Such images’ bleakness is matched by idealism in “Peasants in Pastel: Millet and the Pastel Revival,” a small but charming South Pavilion show of pastoral pastels by Millet and his followers. In marked contrast to Kollwitz’ stark gloomy monochromes, these scenes of farm life sparkle with color and light. It’s interesting to speculate as to whether Kollwitz ever saw Millet’s chalk drawings such as Man with a Hoe (ca. 1860-62), which highlights a farmer’s determination despite his fatigue. Whereas Kollwitz focused on laborers’ travail, Millet and his followers sought to elevate workers’ virtue; but the artists’ core principles, readily applicable to the present day, are more similar than they initially appear.
The Getty Center
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90049
Kollwitz runs through Mar. 29
“Peasants in Pastel” runs through May 10 -
“The Box Project”
Enchanting objects spill from tiny containers in “The Box Project,” an unconventional show of 76 artists from three countries. These artworks were not originally intended for public display; rather, they were created as part of an esoteric correspondence between three interconnected collectives called “Women’s Salons” in Los Angeles, Mexico City and Paris. The women in each city meet regularly to discuss and support one another’s work. Desiring to collaborate across borders in a manner that circumvented social media’s impersonality, they organized a postal exchange of handmade pieces in boxes by members of each group. Arranged inside vitrines and across walls at SPARC, the intricate fruits of their labors include paintings, drawings, sculptures, photos, ceramics, collages, assemblages, found objects, embroidery and fiber art. Some of the boxes contain charms or relics; others take the form of games or poems. Each is accompanied by a brief artist’s statement imparting the provenance of her materials and imagery. Many interweave personal anecdotes of symbolic dreams, fairy tales, family histories, and quotidian moments alongside ruminations on larger social issues. These artists developed their own international community; the private nature and diminutive scale of their works and stories conveys a particular sincereness. The boxes were clearly meant to be handled and treasured by their recipients; but for a wider audience, the total project provokes contemplation as to what art gets shown, what remains unseen, and what is truly meaningful.
Durón Gallery at SPARC
685 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
Show runs through Jan. 18 -
“Morph”
“Celebrate the Bizarre,” urges the header on postcards for “Morph” at Mash Gallery; and the 12 artists in this show surely do. More specifically, they revel in distorting human form for metaphoric and emotive effect. Heads are sundered, patched and obliterated; bodies float, contort, and mutate into things that may or may not be human. In Erik Mark Sandberg‘s portrayals, skin turns to radioactive pink spaghetti; but that doesn’t stop the protagonist of Sky with Leopard Print Tee and Boots (2011) from sporting nifty fashions. Creepy doll-like faces emerge in 3D relief from Haleh Mashian‘s expressionistic paintings of inscrutable goddesses; with morbid pulchritude, works such as Galene, Goddess of Calm Seas (2019) question Greco-Roman conceptions of female deities as archetypes of beauty. Molly Morning-Glory‘s two-faced ceramic bust, You, Me, We (2018), brings to mind how individuals’ self-images are shaped by the gaze of others; nearby, Jayne Anita Smith‘s figures lose their volition and devolve into gobs of mud, clay or paint. Most viscerally disturbing are Serge Serum‘s paintings influenced by his upbringing in violent neighborhoods. I’m not sure what’s going on in Possessed at Harms Length (2019, pictured above), but I don’t think I want to be; and I certainly wouldn’t want to be there.
Mash Gallery
1325 Palmetto Street, Suite 130
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Show runs through Dec. 21 -
Carolyn Castaño
Lush foliage abuts geometric abstraction in Carolyn Castaño‘s vibrant paintings bursting with tropical flair. The Colombian-American artist amalgamates motifs from Latin America and the U.S so harmoniously that it’s often difficult to pinpoint the origin of any given form. Titled in homage to Sogamoso, a Colombian city called “City of The Sun” by the pre-Columbian Muisca people, “The Valley of the Sun” is a series drawing parallels between Modernist and Color Field painting and patterns used by indigenous tribes in Colombia. Chevrons, lines, triangles and rays recall the lexicons of painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland while also resembling designs on Andean ruanas and Wayuu weavings. Neon yellow orbs evoke blazing suns that double as abstract focal points in El Cañon 1, El Cañon 2 and El Cañon 3 (all works 2019), which unite as a triptych to form a sprawling rainforest eerily presided by a solar quartet. Another series, “After América,” features saucy takes on early Europeans’ personification of the New World as a scantily clad goddess named “Columbia” or “America.” Castaño’s modernized versions depict friends and colleagues lying nude amid tawdry jungles collaged from discarded fast-fashion raiment. Price tags and brand labels left among the bunched fabrics suggest that everything is commodified: the painting, the garment, the jungle, perhaps even America herself.
Walter Maciel Gallery
2642 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Dec. 21 -
Gerald Davis
The dotty surfaces of Gerald Davis‘ paintings seem to flicker like tangled strings of tiny lights, amplifying the visionary eeriness of his eccentric renditions of classical subjects such as bathers. The LA painter’s expressionistic pointillism recalls a wide range of references including mosaics, Aboriginal dot paintings, and Jean Metzinger’s Divisionism; yet his manner is unique. Many of the scenes in his current show were created via a monoprint-like technique of pressing wet paintings together, which results in unfussy smears and daubs with peaked textures. Grisly paintings on small sheets of vellum suggest faceless heads and skinned bodies. On larger canvases, intricate patterns of jewel-toned blotches coalesce into faces and figures that exude emotion yet remain vague like half-remembered hallucinations or dreams. Impastoed passages of periwinkle, goldenrod and turquoise in Ecstatic Figure (2019, pictured above) are supposed to represent a bather under a waterfall posed like Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa”, but what of the curved red and salmon rays below the face? It’s impossible to tell, but one could imagine her neck spurting blood or becoming a tulip. In other large paintings, vases of flowers sprout heads, and faces sport multiple eyes and doubled lips. As you stare, the forms and figures seem to morph and move, cryptic like phantoms trying to communicate from another world.
La Loma Projects
1357 Brixton Rd.
Pasadena, CA 91105
Show runs through Dec. 8 -
Linda Besemer
At a distance, the paintings in Linda Besemer‘s show, “An Abundance of Errors,” appear to be large-format prints of digitally derived geometric designs. Indeed, they were initially devised on a computer; but the paintings’ true tactility manifests itself as you approach and find that the wavy lines and hard edges were painstakingly masked off and built up from layers of acrylic. Eschewing the sterile perfection typical of digital designs, Besemer refers to these as “glitch paintings,” for she embraces spontaneities and imperfections that arise as she electronically develops each configuration before hand-painting it. Lines don’t add up; ripples are syncopated; bands of color resembling electronic ribbon cables emerge from nowhere: such idiosyncrasies give each composition a life of its own. Color and black-and-white are employed with equal evocativeness; oddly, you can imagine yourself inside several of the paintings, almost as though they portrayed actual spaces. Vibrating with optical dazzle, D+G Space (pictured above, all works 2019) features clamorous patterns of shredded rainbows interrupting zebrine undulations. Other compositions are quieter, such as Warpy, which evokes a deserted gray amphitheater overtaken by light-filled prisms. These curious realms are so absorbing that even one generally disinclined to digitally-generated visions might not mind lingering.
Vielmetter Los Angeles
1700 S. Santa Fe Ave. #101
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Dec. 21 -
“Images of the Divine in Everyday Mexico”; Día de los Muertos Altars; Contemporary Artists’ Solo Shows
There are so many good shows right now at the Vincent Price Art Museum that it’s impossible to choose just one. “Images of the Divine in Everyday Mexico” comprises retablo and ex-voto paintings from the early 19th to mid-20th centuries. Mostly wrought on small sheets of tin, these humble yet captivating paintings were created as devotional offerings to divinities or saints. Each is painted with a sensitive, idiosyncratic touch to which age and wear confer additional character. Personal narratives of indebtedness to religious figures are related via dedicatory inscriptions ranging from a farmer expressing appreciation for a plague of worms having not destroyed his crop, to a gambler giving thanks for having recuperated his losses, to various expressions of gratitude for the healing of afflictions. Spirituality continues in the “14th Annual Student Altar Exhibition,” featuring Día de los Muertos ofrendas made by Chicano Studies students in honor of prominent Mexican-American artists including Selena Quintanilla, Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert “Magu” Luján. Each altar is as creative as it is informative, including visual displays and essays about the honoree’s artistic legacy. These two shows provide a rich backdrop for historic and cultural themes in solo exhibitions by contemporary LA artists: Umar Rashid, Gabriela Ruiz (installation pictured above), Carolina Caycedo and George Rodriguez.
Vincent Price Art Museum
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Monterey Park, CA 91754
Altar exhibition ends Dec. 6
Other closing dates vary; see museum website for details. -
Laurie Nye
Titled “The Sick Rose” after William Blake’s 1794 poem and engraving, LA painter Laurie Nye‘s current exhibition is like a garden of botanical specimens evoking romance and malady. Describing a rose afflicted by the pernicious love of an invisible worm, Blake’s cryptic verses provided a vivid point of departure for Nye’s meditations on broader emotional, environmental and art-historical themes. Whereas the paintings in her last solo show, “Venusian Weather,” revolved around a fanciful cosmological mythos based on science fiction and ecofeminism, her new paintings are rooted in more austere earthly realities. She has pared her forms and subjects to their essence: her palette is mostly limited to pinks, salmons and reds; her compositions are flowing labyrinths of abstract ripples suggesting human innards and roses’ petal interiors. Each painting is imbued with a unique mood; the longer you gaze, the more hints of anthropomorphism cascade from its ruddy riffles. Some, such as Science Fiction (Ripley’s Rose) (all works 2019), bring to mind bizarre multilobed faces; while others, such as Love and Worry Rose (pictured above) conjure images of blood, pain and human hearts. Completing the effect, real rotting roses nod from a pair of stoneware vases; and past an exquisite series of colored pencil drawings, the back room features a clever installation of small rose paintings hanging underneath a row of diminutive “Pollinator” paintings depicting mask-like butterflies that almost seem to flap their wings as you blink.
Big Pictures Los Angeles
2424 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
Show runs through Nov. 10 -
Katja Seib
What we take as concrete reality often seems as changeable as a hologram: a door appearing orange in the morning looks yellow in afternoon light; former familiars refashion their characters beyond recognition. Inklings of such slipperiness with regard to perception and identity pervade German-born painter Katja Seib‘s shadowy, dreamlike scenes. Suffused with enigmatic symbolism and misgiving, the paintings in her current show, “chasing rabbits,” suggest second selves, mutable personalities, and decision-making dilemmas. Forms evoking mirrors or trees hang overhead a sleeping couple in he is the sweetest peach to fall but I don’t like peaches at all (pictured above, all works 2019); the woman improbably wears black evening gloves, and her pillow bears a makeup print of her face as though it were developing a countenance of its own; while another woman, perhaps the female sleeper’s doppelganger, looms beside the bed with hand to her head in a theatrical expression of despair. Mystery is compounded by the repetition of the title on a small chalkboard within the painting, one of many instances where a poetic phrase reinforces intrigue or humor in Seib’s work. In 7 lives (I been different people many times), a ginger-and-white tabby lounges near a pile of cushions adorned with different women’s portraits. Were the “7 lives” lived by the cat, or by its absent mistress?
Château Shatto
1206 South Maple Ave., Suite 1030
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show runs through Nov. 23 -
Sayre Gomez
Sayre Gomez extracts strangeness and cultural significance from prosaic architectural facets of Southern California. The life-size paintings in his current show evoke banal intersections between commerce, fantasy and nostalgia: strip mall facades are romantically backlit by lightning storms and hazy sunsets; cell phone towers are ineptly disguised as trees; faded advertisements on storefront doors bespeak yesteryear’s escapism. Elaborating the atmosphere of these two-dimensional scenes is a collection of three-dimensional stanchions installed at intervals throughout the gallery. Although they appear to have been plucked from some beleaguered parking lot, these yellow poles are not made of concrete or metal, but painted cardboard and foam. Even so, you’d swear that the chains hanging from them were really steel, and that the decals adorning their surfaces were, indeed, stickers, not meticulously painted trompe l’oeil details. One’s marvel at Gomez’ technical skill gives way to risibility at his sculptures’ sly titles such as Senior Regional Manager (all works 2019) or CEO. Yet the show ends on a grim note. Enterprise appears as a sign outfitted with anti-bird spikes, with the titular word barely legible under a sooty coating of grime. On the adjacent wall is Open, a soft-focus portrayal of a homeless tent encampment, blear and off-kilter as though hastily swept under the civic carpet.
François Ghebaly
2245 E. Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through Nov. 3 -
Kenny Scharf
Few artists crisscross high-low categories as deftly as Kenny Scharf, whose whimsical work inhabits a gallery as strikingly as it does a street. Just down the road from his tire-shop mural, the exterior of Honor Fraser is currently festooned in a tacky crown of plastic toys that dangle menacingly over your head as you the enter the threshold. Inside, assorted large-scale paintings demand a certain degree of earnest consideration while provoking laughter for the brash goofiness of their colorful casts of amorphous characters. Smeared with cosmic orbs and abstract squiggles, a dingy couch and a quartet of once-elegant chairs testify to the fact that no item, however mundane, is immune to having its surface stormed by Scharf’s razzle-dazzle brushwork. The backs of two TV sets are transformed into grinning buck-toothed aliens. Just beyond, green houseplants spill from ceramic flowerpots doubling as portraits of monsters and Fred Flintstone. Amassed from trinkets and toys disgorged from the past, several plastic assemblages evoke the ravenousness of a society perpetually grasping at throwaway baubles. Yet Scharf’s prolific recycling of objects, styles and characters playfully suggests that cultural castoffs can be salvaged and transfigured as easily as they were discarded.
Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Nov. 16 -
Dona Nelson
Like unruly creatures, Dona Nelson‘s double-sided paintings defy convention; they stand free, hang from ceilings and incorporate quotidian materials in bizarre ways. Titled “Painting the Magic Mountain” in wry reference to Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, this show contains 18 new specimens. These canvases’ unique formats evoke billboards, windows, stelae, game pieces, tile floors, embroidered textiles, and human figures; yet their exuberant abstract imagery resists being pinned down. The checklist designates Nelson’s media as “on canvas,” but it might as well say “on and in canvas,” for her acrylic stains bleed through unprimed cotton, and her painted strings not only sit atop the canvas, they trespass its weave in stitches and protrude on the opposite side in defiance of painting’s usual two-dimensionality. Each painting is not only a double image, it is also a sculpture that must be circumambulated; even nails and stretcher bars become aesthetic details. Viewing thus takes on a motional, exploratory quality akin to the painting process. Nelson arrives at each work by enacting a series of arbitrary procedures with paint and cheesecloth until she sees an image emerge “like a character in a play,” she says. “Once I see the character of the painting, I get excited, and then what I have to do to finish the painting becomes clear to me. I follow the painting until its character completely emerges from the shadows.” Once developed, her characters embody curious lives of their own. In one room, you find yourself encircled at close quarters by several freestanding paintings, as though you, not they, were under examination.
Michael Benevento
3712 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Show runs through Nov. 2 -
Naudline Pierre
Informed by her religious upbringing and her love of Renaissance painting, Naudline Pierre re-interprets devotional painting traditions with maverick imaginativeness, devising phantasmagoric scenes where humanoid figures radiate colorful nimbi and commune with winged beings emitting bristly haloes or pointy metaphysical rays. These strange paintings recall antecedents such as William Blake and El Greco, who also painted religious iconography with striking visual unconventionality. Yet Pierre’s mission is more personal. Her father is a pastor; witnessing exorcisms and contemplating fantastic biblical parables kindled her childhood imagination. As an artist, she became keenly aware that classical Eurocentric Christian iconography lacked representations resembling her, a black woman, and now paints her own mythic realm. United by a broad theme of love, the altarpiece-like paintings in her current show bear apocalyptic undercurrents of danger and redemption. The protagonist in these paintings is an alter ego whom Pierre refers to as her “shadow self”; this character, recognizable as the most developed and opaquely painted, abides spiritual conflicts and communions among entities appearing ambiguously angelic, demonic or human. In Eternal Depth of Love Divine (2019, pictured above), a dove beams gray shadows upon Pierre’s face while dark flames lick at her scarlet legs and the golden wings of a melted angel lying beside her. Circumventing clear-cut dichotomies between good and evil, Pierre’s mysterious world offers an open-ended alternative to spiritual dogma.
Shulamit Nazarian
616 N. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Show runs through Oct. 26
